Posts by OffBeatMammal

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after trying various Fitbit and the ilk, I've settled on a Nokia Steel HR (actually, the earlier Withing branded model) and ... I love it. The fact it looks like a real watch, and the battery goes for about 20 days without shutting down is pretty amazing considering it also includes the whole array of heart rate, sleep etc monitoring.

while it's not a full 'smartwatch' I can do simple notifications on the in-built screen and that's usually enough to let me know if I actually want to pick up my phone.

I'd actually trust Nokia - provided they take their network engineering approach - to be the ones who could build out a persona EHR solution for long term tracking and consolidation (and securing) of my data ... as someone who has moved countries (in total four times!) that challenges of keeping the major records are a frustration, but even having changes from Fitbit to Withing has meant I don't have a good consistent record from my pedometer/HR monitor/scale etc .. that's why this industry will continue to churn without someone less obsessed with lock-in and annual replacement than Apple as the shining star

I try to use my iPad as primary device when traveling to avoid needing to take a laptop as well. While, for my use case, Office is okay, and I like a lot of the new split screen and other "pro" tweaks my biggest problem with iOS is that it's still very limited more because of philosophical decisions by Apple to create a locked down eco system (eg I can't set the default mail app to Nine, or switch the web URL handler from Safari to, say, Brave). Allowing OneDrive able to integrate into Files so I don't have to bounce around between different apps/workflows would also be a huge help.

Battery life, compared to my iPad Mini, is terrible. Using it for music as well (either Cloudbeats locally, or Spotify) while working kills it.

Totally agree on the Pencil experience ... I'd hoped that apps like OneNote would do a really good job of being a genuine pen+notepad replacement, but so far all of the options I've tried fall short in usability or capability

For the price tag on the iPad Pro, it's very disappointing and doesn't give it enough "bang" to be a real laptop replacement.... but if Apple could get their head out of their arse about controlling users then there is still hope ...

Even though I'm renting, I would buy a 100/40 connection in a heartbeat, in fact I'd probably pay a couple of grand to have them bring Fiber or even HFC to the house. The seriously crappy ADSL2+ experience is beyond frustrating... but... right now we're still pending surveys to tell us when our neighbourhood might get a plan. It's a joke

having just moved back to Australia after some years in the US as a Comcast customer, I have to say I'm astounded that in the decade I've been away progress seems to be ... zero.

I'm currently living in an Airbnb in South Melbourne - some 15 minutes on a tram from the CBD and the best we can get is ADSL2+, and it's horrific (I presume either the copper from the DSLAM to the house, or the internal wiring, I've already helped the landlord replace one crappy socket!) ... but it's not filling me with confidence that when we move out 30 minutes to the East we'll be able to get anything better than pigeon post... the street we're moving to indicates that they won't even have information available on planned rollout for a coupe of months.

The fact that partisan politics and lobbyists can screw up something like this is a joke... the interesting thing is going to be if Optus or TPG swoop in with a 5G based solution and make all the expense of this rollout redundant (wasting yet more of the taxpayers money)

does the replacement trigger a new warranty period?

one thing I discovered after 3 replacements of my Surface Pro 3 was that the warranty period didn't get reset each time... because I was getting refurb machines they would only honor the original period as 'new', and the last replacement (just inside the original period) only got 90 days of coverage. It, of course, died on about day 120 and now I use a Macbook

The "war on drugs" isn't about making America "safer". It's always been about two things - since 1971 when Nixon used it as a way to criminalize the poor and those who he felt opposed him; protect the bottom line of the drug companies (who, as the article points out, are one of the biggest problems).

Having lived for some years in a State where Marijuana is legal (and which seems to get particular ire from the evil elf Sessions) and seen the good that de-stigmatized, legalized, licensed, revenue producing access brought to help people manage medical conditions ranging from chronic pain to depression and anxiety I live in hope that one day a rational discussion can be had by lawmakers. But while they are bought and sold and trade their beliefs to lobbyists I suspect it'll never happen

showing my age, but back in the mists of time there was a comic called Nova which featured the death of Ralph Rider (the costumed hero's uncle) at the hands of a villain called Jason Dean. Nova (working with Spiderman) realized the pages from the calendar next to the dead uncle, showing just July-December were a message from the dying man...

if there was an ARM native version of the Office suite then I could see some value in this (as long as it's as usable and reliable as my trusty MacBook Air) but if my primary apps are going to be running in emulation mode it'll be a slow, frustrating experience and I suspect would never reach the expected battery life.

telcos will find ways to screw with the experience to try and drag an extra buck out of users (and the device will probably support limited bands which will make hopping countries a pain, not to mention international roaming rip-offs from folks like Telstra that have me searching for wifi when I'm overseas)

It does solve part of the the problem with the previous Windows Phones and ARM based devices in that it can finally run real apps so they won't launch with just the dozen than Microsoft Evangelists could pay people to develop (and drop as soon as the cheques stopped coming)... but the performance is going to be the make or break of this especially if they want to complete with an iPad for the same money but the added cachet of having well optimized apps created for the form factor...

I wonder if MS would have been in the same legal position - viewed as a Telco - if they'd left Skype as a P2P distributed system rather than centralizing control (and systematically ignoring their users to try and turn it into some Snapchat style social network)

the guy who maintained the list is being a bit disingenuous by conflating the problems with two different models (form two different manufacturers) into one list and lumping it under "Pixel" as opposed to splitting between Pixel2 (NFC producing a clicking noise) and Pixel2XL (Screen burn-in). I guess it makes for better headlines.

that said, I loved my Nexus 4. My Nexus 5X has been great, but recently started to misbehave (and I'd really recommend not updating to Android 8 on it, that was the end). The Pixel 2 seems like an okay compromise (no headphone jack, way too expensive, but the iPhone is still to crippled for me to jump ship - https://medium.com/@offbeatmammal/apple-are-a-design-company-so-why-is-ios-so-annoying-d40530dce8d9 ) ... just hoping they do fix the NFC issue and sound quality via software quickly, and that it manages to last at least as long as my Nexus 5X has... (that said, less than impressed so far as it's due to be delivered today along with the trade-in package for my Nexus 5X to go back in... but according to the courier it's still in Ontario!)

wish they'd focus on power consumption in Android for their flagship phones... whatever else this elusive custom silicon does the only thing I care about is actually getting a phone that can survive a genuine day when I'm traveling, not need recharging every few hours. while I'm not a fan of iOS because of some of the restrictions/limitations (and clunky UX) I'll often find myself carrying my old testing iPhone SE in preference to my current Pixel to handle the battery anxiety issues!

Re: ArrrrrG!!!

agree on the keyboard. it's pretty horrible which is why I ended up putting a new battery and bigger SSD in my old Macbook Air to keep it alive!

I actually worked at MS for about 8 years all told, and managed to use a Mac as my daily machine (even though I had no real justification!) most of the time... and in the last few years it was a better machine to run Windows (even via Fusion) than the Surface Pros

One of the great things about the Macs is standardization ... at my new place of work I can walk into any conference room or hot-desk area and there's a USB-C and a Magsafe connector on every desk. To do the same across the wide range of PCs is near impossible. Surface has done a good job keeping their connector consistent, but Sony, HP, Acer, Lenovo etc over the years I ended up with a collection of model-specific power bricks.

while we're at it, why don't we simply roll all the State licensing bodies into one... standardize the driving tests, road rules, and licensing. Would reduce a lot of duplicated effort and frustration. Today we live in a country where it's possibly to communicate from corner to corner at speeds no-one would have believed when the original systems were put in place so the need for these duplicate, similar, but not quite the same, systems is now only historical

It's disappointing to see Telstra, even with a big bucket of money behind them, failing to deliver on promises, especially when there are incremental things they could do that might not be roll-out of 5G (or other headline-worthy things) but would help both city and rural customers (eg follow the Comcast Xfinity model of opening up home wifi hotspots to the Air/Fon network to back-fill coverage)

At the moment I live in the US - Comcast may be shit, but they can deliver a steady 100Mbps down (and 25Mbps up) for $100/mo.

We're moving back home to Aus at the end of the year, and I suspect my daughter will last about a week before demanding we move back to the US so she can get a decent ping time.

It's embarrassing that this project has been burning so much money, for so long, and the roll-out is so far from completion while our neighbours in NZ, and much of Asia leave us in the dust.

It's not like any of this is rocket science... people know how to roll out reliable, cost effective, highly performant networks ... but the politicians and their mates, the consultants and the greedy contractors saw the dollar signs flashing and we're left with this crock

agreed! I remember years ago using a Sony Vaio "Picturebook" as my on-call device, tethered to my (1st gen) LG 3G flip-phone (if I couldn't find a landland!). Now luckily with remote desktop software and an iPad Mini I'm pretty much good to go, but sometimes the on-screen keyboard is enough of a frustration that this form factor would be good to get back to

The "3" in Surface Pro 3 for me was the number of warranty replacements I had to go through before I finally gave up on the machine.

First failure was the battery ... apparently holding a charge for more than 30 minutes is desirable, but when the device is a sealed unit it's really hard to replace the battery.

Second failure was the screen stopped responding to touch except for about a 1" strip ... but that's glued to the unit as well and not replaceable

Third failure it just refused to power up at all and the tech couldn't work out what it was so got the final replacement.

The biggest problem for me though was the painful process of re-imaging the replacement machines (and this is a general Windows gripe) ... because of the convoluted registry it's not as simple as just doing a 'backup your apps and documents regularly and you can restore to a new machine" ... you have to reinstall programs (which is a pain if there are serial numbers or specific configurations that have to be re-created).

I've quickly learned that the only place to keep documents is in the cloud (because I've Office365 I use, and like OneDrive, but GDrive or Dropbox are equally useful) because when Windows borks it tends to bork hard.

I almost got a Dell XPS13 as the replacement, but I do a lot of video conferencing on the road and the camera position was just too weird, so now I'm using a Macbook Air (with Windows in a Fusion VM for the odd occasions I need it) and I'm very happy

Re: "Sounds like a lawsuit"

New Pandora logo is horrible

Personally I hate the new Pandora logo. So much so that while it used to be the first music app in that folder on my android phone (so became the groups primary icon) I moved it to second place so I didn't have to look at it all the time. The result is I'm using Pandora a lot less and Spotify more. I did submit a customer support request back when they made the change to undo it!

and even when it's delivered automagically it can still f#ck you up...

I have a couple of machines that came pre-installed with W10 Home. Because RDP doesn't work on Home (and I couldn't see the point of paying for Pro just for RDP) I use RDPWrap (https://github.com/stascorp/rdpwrap) and have done since Win7 days as needed. For some reason Creators Update borked it. Not a problem, except now I can't remote into the machines which are several hours drive away. Sigh.

my guess is that they plan to use a mix of the spectrum they just bought and wifi calling by turning broadband customers modems into hotspots to help fill in the backbone in areas where they have less dense coverage.

Google Fi and Comcast in the US have had some success with that model, and as a (US) T-Mobile customer I do like the wifi calling fallback when the mobile signal isn't strong enough.

The downside of relying on wifi for backfill though is that the range isn't good so in more rural areas you're less likely to be close to somewhere you can use for a boost.

This is one instance where having a single infrastructure company who owns the towers and then leases capacity to the 3 or 4 consumer facing telcos would make more sense ... their charter would simply be to provide 100% coverage but rather than each Telco having to build towers they share footprint and amortize costs...

Comcast vs Google isn't Apples to Apples...

a lot of comments are saying that Google has an unfair advantage when it comes to monetizing user data. that's wrong, for a couple of reasons:

- I'm already paying my ISP to provide 'carriage' for my data, if they're not making money they can always shut down ... as it is they keep upping my monthly bill for no improvement of service

- Google make money by making their services attractive. unlike the ISP I have choice when it comes to search or email

- my ISP (potentially) has visibility of every packet in and out of my house, no matter what site I am visiting

- Google (or Facebook or whoever) only get visibility over what I do when I am on their site, interacting with their services or viewing a page that has chosen to include one of their ads in.

by allowing unlimited spying and additional monetization of the traffic I put over my ISP this ruling potentially exposes things I don't want shared with advertisers ... for instance I have just had surgery on my spine so there's a bunch of research I've been doing on the procedure, the recovery, and the various drugs that I'm being prescribed along the way, as well as interactions with the medical staff via their website (nicely SSL'd so less concerned in this case)... I hate to think what spam I'd start getting as a result of this for recuperative products, ambulance chasing lawyers, drug dependency rehab clinics etc...

so, the outcome is this drives users to HTTPS, Encrypted DNS requests, TOR, or VPNs... all of which add overhead but also obfuscate the data on the network even more thoroughly... which in turn makes their efforts to find the terrorists and kiddy fiddlers harder.

another great example of why politicians should not be allowed to make policy!

how do the authorities know he checked whatsapp? that would imply a certain level of access either to a now unlocked device, or the whatsapp data. if all they have is a network trace showing that whatsapp received a message it could be totally irrelevant...

the Skype UI is a mess, and the add-on things (like SkypeIn, calling minutes) is so convoluted and overpriced it really looks like they're trying to be a traditional carrier vs the potential to create a useful global platform

Skype for business is faring a little better in recent months, especially with the new macOS client, but still has some crazy UI/UX decisions around the interface and how conversations are (mis-)handled

and please, for the love of $DEITY$ would someone explain why I need two clients with a significant amount of overlap... Outlook can manage to talk to Exchange, IMAP, POP3 etc, Trillium could talk to every IM protocol going etc, but we still have to have a 1:1 relationship with client:chat persona :(

totally agree... I used an iPad Mini4 and love it both as an eReader and for note taking, but having to use the on screen keyboard is limiting and sadly because it's not a "Pro" their Pencil won't work with it, and while there are a bunch of third party active bluetooth stylii available a lot of apps like OneNote don't provide support for them (I know OneNote supports "Pencil by 53" but that's like using a crayon!)

so new processors, more memory and price reductions are not a good thing these days?

pundits calling the iPad "done" should perhaps compare how well they're selling vs an even faster declining PC market.

for sure, there are areas where the iPad could do with improvement, and certainly areas where iOS could become less crappy but unlike so many of the Android tablets Apple continue to create a product that actually meets the needs of it's users and while we nerds may get pissy about incremental improvement sometimes slow and steady is a good strategy.

while Apple have lost the plot at the moment with their Pro laptops I think the reaction has been strong enough that they'll get their head back in the game and we'll see things continue to innovate, but there's no point adding features if they just add cost and not benefit

2FA still not user friendly

my biggest complaint about most of the 2FA solutions out there is they are a pain... either I have to insert a USB device (find my keyring, plug it in, use it, try not to forget it!) or type in a secret code that expired 1 second before I hit enter!

when I say some of the yubikeys supported NFC I thought for one moment they'd solved both the clumsy USB plugging in problem and being able to support iOS/Android devices ... but nope. Most PCs don't seem to support NFC readers yet and while most smartphones can use NFC it's not integrated into the unlock process or developers aren't using it to support unlock

when you look at some of the crazy 2FA login schemes out there (First Direct I'm looking at you) there's a lot of frustration to be removed by whoever comes up with a good solution first...

Re: Ah, Excel sorting

but... why would you edit an intermediate file not the master "source of truth"? and again, Excel CSV import can be told about formatting so it knows what columns it should treat as (say) text. I'm not an Excel fan, but most gripes with it are down to how people use it - watching the magic that experts can whip up is astounding!

Re: Similar Scam in Hong Kong

Actually, with the rise in off-shoring here in the US and every call center now routing to somewhere in India or the Philippines it's a rarity to actually call and get a genuine American accent. Not saying the US call center does any better of a job, but I'd certainly be more comfortable knowing that access to my financial information is staying within geo-political boundaries

so... rather than just bitch about it here... I was inspired to file an FTC complaint, and kick off a petition (hey, you never know) ... please show your support ... https://www.change.org/p/tim-cook-apple-to-allow-users-to-choose-default-applications-and-services-on-ios-devices

In the US at least Samsung have not gone through the "official" recall process - http://www.consumerreports.org/smartphones/consumer-reports-samsung-should-officially-recall-galaxy-note7/ ... this means they're handling it themselves and that maybe opens them up to liability especially as retailers are still potentially selling ticking time bombs. I did see of one report where a Note7 has set fire to a hotel room and Samsung have agreed to pay for the damages (http://gizmodo.com/galaxy-note-7-explodes-in-hotel-room-and-causes-nearly-1786279887)

Sad really... I was going to get one last weekend, but seeing the news I might hold off for a while...

generate the bitcoins based on dwell time

Why not tie is back even closer to the value of the site... have the browser mining for bitcoins (as part of a pool of all Brave users) in the background and depending on how long I spend on a site deposit the appropriate percentage of earnings with the site in question.

the longer I stay engaged with a site, the more it earns. so TheRegister which continues to amuse and inform would get more of the slice of the pie than, say, Wired which daily becomes less relevant...

Re: So far so good...

similar experience... before yesterdays update I'd get somewhere between 45 mins and an hour on a full charge. yesterday after the update (and another reboot for good measure) I got over 5 hours before the thing finally ran out of juice and I had to re-tether.

what is frustrating is I had to go through a whole return/replace procedure on my original SP3 for this issue that I could probably have avoided

true. the Macbook neither works as a tablet (no removable keyboard) nor does it (or any other Mac laptop) support touch (which is pretty commonplace in the PC world). it's a good little laptop, but it's not a fair comparison.

the iPad Pro and the Surface Pro are more apples to apples (pun intended) even though the Surface is a more general/backwards compatible computing device and the iPad Pro essentially a jumped up phone ... but in terms of the sorts of things you can do when you plug in the keyboard and swipe around the touchscreen it is a fair comparison... especially when you look at the price tags

Re: What is it exactly?

LUIS parses a given sentence - supplied as text (from a chat client, Speech-to-Text functionality, or otherwise prepared and delivered) - and returns an intent and entities (eg assuming the developer has built a model for a music player then "I want to listen to Sade" would give me an intent of "PlaySong" and an entity of "Sade") - it leverages both specific domain training data (supplied by the developer in the form of annotated phrases) and then overlays that on the general Corpus that Microsoft have build for the language understanding models. The models can be a little more sophisticated (eg prompting for missing required items) but are fairly simple to train and interact with.

The developers application may know about you, but your interaction with LUIS is anonymised via the proxy that is the app you're interacting with (though depending on how that's architected there may be correlation possible via IP address)

maybe the vans just contain stealthy gentlemen armed with a small drill and an endoscope camera and they simply observe rooms where suspect action takes place... low tech and they can even take photos of the evidence ;)

in other news... as an ex-pat, I'd pay a license fee to watch the BBC here in the US (not the BBC America mess) but I suspect the audience isn't big enough for them to tweak iPlayer for the FireTV to support that...